Trump isn’t the only one with a Twitter problem

I have a problem and I need your help.
Much as I wish I could, I can’t stop thinking about U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and his alleged Twitter endorsement of a porn site.
By now, we’re all familiar with the story. It all happened as Texas’ Gulf Coast was still soaked to the bone by Hurricane Harvey, and Florida and the Caribbean were steel drum deep in Irma’s deluge. Apparently undeterred by these Biblical-level weather events, “someone” with access to Cruz’s Twitter feed “liked” a spell-check evading entry titled “Sexuall Posts”.
But it wasn’t Ted himself who had given a thumbs-up (or whatever appendage you prefer) to this online porn. Nope. No way. It wasn’t him. Honest.
“It was not me,” Cruz told CNN’s Dana Bash, adding that the endorsement was “an honest mistake” committed by a staffer who apparently had a little too much time—or something—on his or her hands.
“I promise you, the staffer feels terrible. It was a staffing issue and it was inadvertent, it was a mistake, it was not a deliberate action,” Cruz added in other news sources. “We’re dealing with it internally but it was a mistake, it was not malicious conduct.”
Screenwriter and generally funny guy Craig Mazin wasn’t having it. Shortly after the “Sexuall Posts” tweet story broke, Mazing himself tweeted: “Sadly, the fact that Ted Cruz jacks off to mediocre porn spam is the most human thing we can say about him. This is actually his high point.”
Mazin should know. He was Cruz’s roommate at Princeton University in 1988, and claims to have witnessed first hand (sorry) Cruz’s propensity for self-salami slapping.
“Imagine Ted Cruz is doing this four feet below you in the bottom bunk bed,” Mazin added.
Pardon me while I take time to refocus; that image caused my eyes to roll all the way back inside my skull and now they’re stuck.
This isn’t the first time Cruz has found himself in a porn-y pickle. Many of us can remember when he worked for Texas’ then-attorney general/now-governor Greg Abbott. One of that duo’s most headline-catching activities was their defense of an
archaic state law that restricted sales of dildoes.
Because, you know, priorities.
MotherJones.com reports that Cruz’s defending brief at that time compared “the use of sex toys to ‘hiring a willing prostitute or engaging in consensual bigamy,’ and it equated advertising these products with the commercial promotion of prostitution.”
Finally, in 2008, the Texas Court of Appeals told Cruz to keep his grubby hands off his fellow Texans’ silicone dicks and whatnot. Happy ending, so to speak.
Continuing his recent “not mea Twitter culpa” CNN interview with Bash, Cruz defended that anti-dildo crusade.
“The attorney general’s job is to defend the laws passed by the Texas legislature. One of those laws was a law restricting the sale of sex toys, which is a stupid law,” Cruz said without so much as a hint of irony or self-awareness.
Then came possibly the most hypocritical statement to ever pass Cruz’s curly little lips:
“Consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in their bedrooms,” he said with an absolutely straight face.
Does this mean that Cruz now embraces the fact that LGBTQ folk should be able to enjoy the same rights he and his wife Heidi do—even if only in the privacy of their own bedrooms, presumably with the doors locked, blinds drawn and an endless loop of The Gaithers’ Greatest Hits blaring on the 8-track hi-fi to drown out any offending moans of passion?
It bears repeating: Ted Cruz actually said these words: “Consenting adults should be able to do whatever they want in their bedrooms.”
Does this mean he believes consenting same-sex adult couples are also entitled to do whatever they want in their bedrooms?
Really? Whatever? Have freaky sex? Have missionary-position sex? Have no sex? Curl up under the covers, watch The Parent Trap (the real one, starring Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills) and eat pizza? Invite a minister into the boudoir and get married? Plan a family and get busy with a turkey baster (does anyone still do that)? Watch porn on Twitter?
I know. Kinky.
But back to my problem.
As a free-lance writer, believe it or not, my assignments are not all gayness and glitter. My client roster is as diverse as the rainbow flag itself. And this month finds me covering an event where one of the keynote speakers is—yep, you guessed it—U.S. Senator Ted Cruz.
So, specifically, my problem is how to accurately and intelligently report on the Senator’s speech while ignoring my mind’s image of him—I mean, his staffer—salaciously hunched over Twitter, doing what comes naturally.
It burns. Help me.